


An Untidy Mind

by tartanfics



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dreams, M/M, hard drive brain, potentially cracky situations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-18
Updated: 2011-07-18
Packaged: 2017-10-21 13:22:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/225641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tartanfics/pseuds/tartanfics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock has always been glad he doesn’t remember dreams--too distracting, too nonsensical; they fill space in the brain in improbable ways, unnecessarily large for something which doesn’t matter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Untidy Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for a [](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/profile)[ **sherlockbbc_fic**](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/) prompt, [here](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/9640.html?thread=47567016#t47567016). After a few years of knowing each other, Sherlock starts to meet up with John in his dreams so John can help him decide what to delete from his hard drive/brain attic.

Sherlock sleeps so infrequently that when he does he sleeps like the dead, blank and dark and dreamless. (Who can say how the dead sleep, really? That expression functions only from the point of view of the living. Maybe the dead do dream, “what dreams may come.”) He wakes up sharply, never dozes. Sherlock doesn’t waste _time_ on sleep, when he sleeps.

And he doesn’t dream.

Until, one night, he does. 17th June, 2013. Sherlock has always been glad he doesn’t remember dreams--too distracting, too nonsensical; they fill space in the brain in improbable ways, unnecessarily large for something which doesn’t _matter_.

“Sherlock?”

John’s voice, muffled from behind a wall of _things_.

The room he’s in is impossible, like no room he’s ever seen, or like _all_ the rooms he’s ever seen. It looks like a cross between the inside of a computer, a chemistry lab, and an absurdly cluttered antique shop. Everything is in full colour--of course when Sherlock does dream, he dreams in extraordinary detail.

When Sherlock pictures his brain, his hard drive, he pictures orderly files--cross-referenced in all directions, yes, but white and clean and manageable. It’s the best way he knows to keep the constant flow of information in line, easy to weed out the unnecessary files, easy to search through. Easy not to see too much.

If he had ever bothered to wonder what other people’s brains look like, normal people’s brains, this room is probably what he would, uncharitably, have imagined.

“Sherlock?”

John steps around a pile of furniture, nearly trips over a dead cat (he makes a disgusted face), and steps towards Sherlock. “What am I doing here, Sherlock?” he asks, as he kicks aside a book and picks his way over a couple of giant AA batteries.

Sherlock plucks a small flower off John’s shoulder where it clings to his jumper. “Myosotis scorpioides,” he says.

“Sorry?”

“Not important.” Sherlock tosses the flower away into the mess. “Housekeeping.”

“What?”

“You’re here to help me clean house. It has become terribly disorganized in here. We have been busy lately, but this is awful.”

“Housekeeping, you? Or what, you want me to do your tidying for you? You don’t normally bother asking.”

“I don’t normally _care_. Physical messes are irrelevant.”

John snorts and leans against what looks like Lestrade’s desk. “I’ve noticed,” he mutters.

Sherlock ignores him, swinging his body around at the hips and looking at the pile of origami shapes behind him. “You’re helping me decide what to delete,” Sherlock announces, sneering. “Apparently my subconscious has decided I no longer know what’s important.”

“Well, yes. You deleted the solar system, Sherlock!”

“And I was perfectly content without it. I’m stuck with it, now, thanks to you. Look, it’s over by that skeleton.” A large model of the solar system is floating above a skeleton. There’s a string attached to the sun, clearly connecting it to something and holding it suspended, but the string seems to fade into a blurry grey cloud. The ceiling is invisible.

“Couldn’t you just delete it again, if it’s really so useless to you?” John asks.

“No, look, I’ve no idea how we’d get it down. Far too much trouble.”

“Right, fine.” John looks around. “Should I be flattered that your brain thinks you need my help cleaning it out?”

Sherlock is barely listening, already impatient to begin the work. This horrible untidiness is pressing against his temples. His brain hasn’t been this much of a mess in _years_ ; he can’t think how it got this bad. The last time his brain looked like this was January and Sherlock had forgotten his coat in his rush to get out of the flat and restock his supply of cocaine.

“What about this? I don’t need this,” Sherlock says, holding up a DVD of the B series of QI.

“No, probably not,” John admits. Sherlock tosses the DVD into a large bin, which looks a lot like the Recycle Bin icon on John’s computer. “What about this?” John asks, picking up a crumpled slip of paper and flattening it out. “34 Tottenham Court Road, see man for fish.”

“No, I need that,” Sherlock says, snatching it out of John’s hand and stuffing it into one of the desk drawers.

“Fine,” John says, stepping away and rummaging around in the pile of furniture. “Your brain is like that room in Harry Potter.” He pulls out a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and holds it up.

“Delete that,” Sherlock says from behind a tall urn.

“You want to delete Harry Potter?”

“Do I want to delete a children’s book about an eleven-year-old wizard? Yes, I do.”

“He’s seventeen in this one,” John says, but he drops the book into the bin all the same.

“I don’t need this, do I?” Sherlock asks, holding a CD.

“Sherlock!”

“What?”

“I gave you that!”

“Oh.” Sherlock looks down at the CD, and back up at John. “Did I listen to it?”

“You should,” John says. It sounds like a threat.

Sherlock inspects the CD (plastic wrapping still on), and tucks it into his jacket pocket.

“Sherlock?”

“Hmm?”

But John isn’t even looking in his direction, paging through a book a careful distance away from the dead cat.

“Sherlock?”

No, that was definitely not John. John’s voice though. Sherlock looks around him at all the awful clutter, and sees no one else.

“What, John?”

“Sherlock!”

Sherlock wakes with a start, and for a moment sees nothing but John’s eyes. John is bending over him where he’s lying on the couch, hand on his shoulder. “Sorry,” John mutters, moving his hand away and stepping back. “Lestrade’s downstairs, he says he has a case for you.”

“Ah. Yes. A moment.”

John rounds the coffee table, glancing back at Sherlock over his shoulder, and goes to collect his jacket. Sherlock sits up, swinging his legs off the edge of the couch, and rubs at his eyes. Ridiculous. His brain doesn’t really look like that. It can’t be that bad, or he would never have fallen asleep in the first place.

As he gets up, straightening his collar, he spots something sitting half under a newspaper on the coffee table. Colourful, plastic--the CD John gave him. No particular occasion; John simply came home with the shopping one day and told Sherlock he thought he might like the music. Sherlock had wondered at the time. It would never occur to him to buy John a CD he might like for no reason, but Sherlock has learned that judging John’s behaviour based on his own is rarely successful. And John may have had a reason. Perhaps there was an occasion, and Sherlock had simply deleted it. Perhaps that was why his subconscious had decided John should approve all future deletions.

Sherlock tucks the CD into his jacket pocket again, in a movement, shifting muscles, fingers against the rustling plastic, that’s familiar, almost déjà vu. It’s on the tip of his tongue, like a case almost solved, but it’s not relevant, not really. Lestrade is downstairs, there’s a case (hopefully not a boring one) to be solved. Sherlock shakes off the dream (for the moment), and gets his coat.

When it happens again the next time Sherlock sleeps, he is barely surprised. He simply holds up the menu for the Chinese restaurant they ate at last Thursday, and asks, “Important?”

He can see the memory move across John’s face, as he connects the name of the restaurant with what they ordered (sesame chicken, egg rolls, too much salt), with the way they watched each other. Sherlock’s fingers curling around his chopsticks, John’s face when he bit into the first egg roll, the tension created not by a case mid-flow but by the _lack_ of case, of finding something to talk about that wasn’t death and crime. Sherlock hadn’t known quite what to make of it.

“Yes, Sherlock,” John says. “That’s important.”

Sherlock nods, knowing now, instinctively, that he’s right. He puts the menu carefully into a desk drawer, and bins the photos from the latest crime scene.


End file.
